Political movements are quite often fraught with division between totalists,
who want to accomplish all the movement's goals right now and will settle
for nothing less, and incrementalists, who favor a more step-by-step approach.
Successful movements require elements of both.

Republican politicians frequently complain that too often "the far
right" has unrealistic, totalist expectations of them. Of course
the GOP is in sympathy with many of these right-wingers' goals, but politics
is the art of the possible. These righties, so the argument goes, fail
to appreciate the value of incrementalism.

I'm not opposed to incrementalism - really. I consider myself to be more
of an incrementalist myself. I fully understand that it took decades to
grow government to its present size, to subvert traditional cultural norms
and social institutions and to reap the attendant consequences of these
actions. A depression coupled with a world war, followed by the Soviet
threat, was required to render the Constitution essentially a dead letter.
It likely will take decades to reverse all of this and possibly a major
catastrophe to consummate its reversal. I just happen to think that conservative
Republicans often go about incrementalism in the wrong way.

Too often, conservative incrementalists confuse a slower implementation
of liberal policy goals with an incremental approach to our own objectives.
This includes growing government more slowly, coming up with clever "market-based"
alternatives to liberal proposals, accepting the programs liberals want
but refusing to spend as much money on them as the liberals would, etc.
This is not really a conservative incrementalism, but a sort of halting,
unintentional liberal incrementalism. If the step by step approach, followed
to its logical progression, is likely to conclude with precisely the opposite
of what we want, it is not an approach we should be supporting.

Both the lack of seriousness and political consequences of this approach
can be illustrated no better than in examining abortion and judical appointments.
Republican presidential campaigns typically back away from making opposition
to abortion - or more precisely, the conviction that Roe v. Wade was wrongly
decided - a "litmus test" for judicial appointments. Putting
aside for a moment the fact that support for Roe v. Wade means that the
Constitution itself isn't going to be a litmus test for one's judicial
rulings, it at first seems reasonable to not exclude competent people
from the federal bench on the basis of one issue.

Until the following is taken into account: In the administration of any
Democrat likely to be nominated by their party to the presidency, including
Al Gore, there is little chance that a pro-life jurist will receive a
federal judicial appointment and absolutely no chance that a single person
who would overturn Roe v. Wade will receive a judgeship. The days of Byron
White are over. Barring the uncontrollable circumstance of post-appointment
conversion, the only opportunity to place people on the bench who would
reverse Roe is during Republican administrations.

Yet Republicans appoint federal judges who both favor and oppose Roe.
For example, Ronald Reagan promoted William Renquhist, an anti-Roe Nixon
appointee, to chief justice and also put anti-Roe Antonin Scalia on the
Supreme Court. But Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor both voted
in 1992 to uphold the essence of Roe. George Bush appointed Clarence Thomas,
who opposes Roe, and also David Souter, despite warnings from such estimable
conservative activists as Paul Weyrich and Howard Phillips that he was
pro-abortion. Conservative objectives include restoring legal protection
to the unborn child and removing legal sanction from a culture that kills
them at the rate of 1.5 million per year as well as reigning in the judiciary
and restoring the rule of law; there is no way the past approach, which
George W. Bush pledges to continue, can be reasonably expected to advance
any of these.

Democrats put people who favor abortion and the idea that the judiciary
should make the law on the court. Republicans don't expect any better
from them, which is why only a a handful of them dared oppose openly pro-abortion
Supreme Court nominees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer - they knew
from Bill Clinton's lower court appointees they would not get anybody
who was better on the abortion issue, and could quite conceivably get
someone much worse all around. Yet that does not embolden them to select
serious constitutionalists when it is their turn to pick the judges.

A jurist's opinion of Roe has ramifications for far more than the crucial
abortion issue - it is emblematic of that jurist's position on the role
of the judiciary and the rule of law. The Supreme Court's anti-Roe justices,
Renqhist, Scalia and Thomas, consistently base their decisions on the
written law. The remainder subordinate the written law to their political
vision and opinions - with Justices O'Connor and Kennedy differing only
from Breyer, Ginsburg and Souter in generally having more sensible opinions.
You don't have to agree with a totalist like former Regent University
Law School Dean Herb Titus, who believes a conservative president should
simply renounce unconstitutional decisions like Roe and proceed in disregard
of them (in this case by instructing US attorneys to prosecute abortionists)
to realize that this brand of Republican incrementalism isn't ultimately
going to take us where most conservatives would like to go.

Conservatives too often pride themselves on making the implementation
of the liberal agenda as slow and painful as possible, rather than stopping
it cold or reversing it. Indeed, the American right has been more effective
at blocking the left than most of its Western European and Canadian counterparts.
But the ultimate test of any conservative politics is whether it actually
stands a chance of conserving anything.

Anything, that is, besides the gains of the last generation's left.

W. James Antle III has worked for the Rhema Group, an Ohio-based politcal
consulting firm. You can e-mail him at Jimantle@aol.com